Casey Walsh

This is an anthropological study of the social and cultural dimensions of groundwater regulation in California. It draws on ten years of field research about how people in California’s Cuyama Valley conceptualize community and manage groundwater in a context of rapid depletion, climatic uncertainty and globalized capitalist agriculture. The book I will write, Neighborly Waters: Groundwater Regulation in California, explores the design, implementation and effects of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), which aims to reduce groundwater extraction by 20% across the state of California. It tells a story of local residents as they contribute to building regulatory institutions and practices to end groundwater depletion. They do this in opposition to large non-local agribusinesses owned by financial capital, which seek to maximize their use of the water for as long as possible. In this struggle, local actors have learned to work with each other as “good neighbors,” acquiring expertise in water law and geohydrology, questioning the environmental destructiveness of unregulated capitalist enterprise, and recasting the meaning of property. This is the basis of a 21st century “mode of regulation” that organizes a reduction of pumping to achieve sustainable groundwater use.